


The Whistling Always

by TMAylor



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, also stalking & weird computer stuff?, apeirophobia, babeys first ao3, its just a fake episode lmao i hope u like it, its my vast avatarsona and its very self-indulgent, oh also brief mention of rejection after coming out, probably takes place in s2 or smth idk, uhh what else. space. college. friends fighting. loss of control bc of fear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23845732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TMAylor/pseuds/TMAylor
Summary: Statement of Katie Davis, regarding the alleged transformation and eventual disappearance of her former university roommate. Original statement given April 11th, 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.Statement begins.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	The Whistling Always

**Author's Note:**

> hi thanks for coming to read about TMAylor, my super self-indulgent avatarsona. i literally haven't posted fanfic anywhere since like uhhhh 2006 so hopefully this is as worth it to y'all as it was to me LOL
> 
> big thanks 2 mushroomys on twitter for all their amazing art which i will post below if i can figure out the formatting
> 
> as of posting i'm only on ep 83 of TMA but this was supposed to be about as standalone as it can get so it should be fine
> 
> comments v welcome & pls enjoy!!!

Statement of Katie Davis, regarding the alleged transformation and eventual disappearance of her former university roommate. Original statement given April 11th, 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

—

I guess I didn’t realize just how afraid she was. It sucks to think that I didn’t know as much about her as I thought I did. She was always the open book, not me. She was always the one who joked that we were the Davis sisters. We had the same last name, but we weren’t related. We were best friends, though. I thought we were.

I met Taylor near the end of high school through a mutual friend of ours. We’d go to these bonfire parties where we’d burn all of our homework at the end of the year—I guess for catharsis? Some kids would even throw their plastic binders in. I remember them melting, dripping like oil, turning the fire green and purple and—and all these awful, unnatural colors.

Sorry. That doesn’t matter. I’m nervous. I’ve always been that way, nervous around other people. I was nervous when she started to talk to me too, since she was an upperclassman, but it was all very casual at first. We were really only acquaintances until that other friend didn’t take Taylor coming out too well. They’d known each other since they were kids, and Taylor took it pretty hard. I was going through something similar at the time—with a friend, I mean, I’m not—I’m straight. I have a husband now. That doesn’t matter either. I’m sorry, can I get a drink of water? [PAUSE] Thank you. The point is, we commiserated, and after that, we seemed to get a lot closer.

We were total opposites, but it was one of those things where our traits complemented each other. She was impulsive, but I was always there to rein her in before she did anything too crazy. I was shy, but she loved making friends. I think she hosted all the parties we both went to after that.

Eventually, we decided to room together at college. People told us not to. Said it was the perfect way to end a friendship forever. I don’t know. Maybe you could say that’s what happened here, but...I’m not sure. I almost feel like they would have found her anyways.

It was in our sophomore year, second semester. She was an English major, and I was studying astronomy. We used to tease each other about it, since I absolutely hated to read, and Taylor absolutely hated to hear about space. She was fine with me not reading (she blamed the school system for sucking the joy of it out of me), but I couldn’t understand why she didn’t like space. I mean space was...space! I thought it was beautiful. I couldn’t imagine someone looking up at a sky full of stars and feeling anything other than utter awe, or just happy to be alive so they could witness such a wonder. I always felt a sense of peace in knowing there’s still things happening millions and billions of lightyears away. I liked knowing there were planets and stars out there that were huge enough to make our sun look nonexistent. It made me feel small, but in a good way. It made me feel like I was part of something much bigger. Maybe it just made Taylor feel small.

Anyways, there was this little restaurant we’d go to sometimes called The Amber Parlor. It was pretty quiet and right on campus, which made it a good place to study. People joked that it was run by a cult, and it was true that most of the employees were pretty patchwork. I try not to be too judgmental, but the place just attracted a lot of weirdos. They owned a farm a mile or so away that was run in some kind of commune operation, and they might have had some unorthodox religious stuff going on in the background, and I’m pretty sure most of them were high half the time, but the food tasted so good that you almost didn’t mind when your waitress spaced out in the middle of serving it.

We were in the middle of dinner there one evening when I felt—when I heard—I don’t know how to put it. It’s like the person got there after the question, the way thunder follows lightning.

“Can I show you something?”

I looked up from my food and saw them for the first time. They looked to be around our age, but their hair was white, and it wasn’t colored in the way that a lot of the others had done theirs, cheap box dyes. It was an airy, frazzled, brittle white. An old person’s hair. All white, except for a small whip of black near the front.

They stood there, looking at us. Or—that’s not right. They never opened their eyes. But they just stood there after asking that, expectant, their expression as smooth and pleasant as a lake in spring. Or a statue. Or, well, I guess a corpse is too on the nose. But I could feel a perception there. A knowledge around them. I don’t know how to say it except that they stood there, and despite all appearances that they were looking, somehow, directly at Taylor.

There was a clatter, and I looked back at her. The spoon she’d been using was wobbling on the table, her soup splattered there like a bloodstain, and she had gone very pale. Her eyes were so wide; she looked like she’d just been slapped. Her chest began to rise and fall very fast, her breath getting ragged, and her lips began to quiver, as if she desperately wanted to speak, or else cry out.

Seeing her so afraid frightened me, so I called her name, asked if she was okay. I mean, she obviously wasn’t, but I didn’t know what else to do. At that, our eyes met, and she seemed to come back to herself a bit. She stood up so fast that the ice in our drinks rattled, threw enough money on the table to cover both our meals, and jerked her head at me, like, _We’re leaving. Now._

It was an awkward squeeze past them as we exited the booth, but they didn’t seem to mind. Just stood there. Smiling. Watching us go with their eyes closed. Taylor was ahead of me and out the door, but I couldn’t help but stand there for a moment, trying to see if anybody else in the cafe noticed the little scene we were making. All around us, people were eating and drinking and chatting and laughing, and in the middle of it, them. Just me and that—it felt unreal. Like everything around me was just the background footage of some separate movie playing. Like it had been pre-recorded.

I took a step back, but they didn’t move. They just asked if I would go check on Taylor—they called her Miss Davis—and later on, if I got the chance, could I please let her know that their offer still stood. Then they cocked their head, as if in thought, smiled with teeth, and said, “Take care, Katie.”

I was out the door pretty fast myself after that.

When I got back to the car, Taylor was already sitting in the passenger seat, hands pressed over her face, shaking. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or simply too upset to talk. I bit back all the questions I had and drove us back to the apartment, where I got her to sit down and have a hot drink. She looked terrible. The sparkle in her eyes was gone; they seemed to concave as she stared into the middle distance over her mug. Then she told me she’d fucked up.

She laughed after she said it—that was a tic she had, she’d laugh after most things she said, funny or not. But this was hollow. A defeated laugh, like she’d lost some horrible bet and couldn’t bring herself to believe it. At this point, I was thinking maybe that’s exactly what happened, that she’d gotten involved in something stupid, like an underground gambling ring, or, I don’t know. Drugs. Maybe she owed that person money and they’d looked us up online. I couldn’t think of another reason they’d known my name. I was rationalizing.

I said that whatever it was, whatever was going on, we could get through it. That if she told me what was happening, we could go to the police or call her dad. She laughed again, a real one this time, and said no, that’s not what this was.

Her fingers were white and skeletal, gripping her mug with a clawed fervor, her knuckles cherried red. She asked if I’d ever been so afraid of something that I would do whatever it took to overcome it.

We regarded each other, the space between us stretching like taffy. I wanted to break the tension—crack a dumb joke like, sure, I wish all the spiders on Earth were packaged up and catapulted to Pluto all the time—but I couldn’t get it out. Taylor could be intense at times, but as her eyes barreled into mine, probing and recessing, I felt my head start to hurt. Not too bad, it just felt off. Wrong. That same feeling you get when you’re staring into a mirror reflecting a mirror.

She told me she was afraid of forever. I thought she meant death, and I told her I was too, but she shook her head, said it was more than that. She started mumbling about space and fractals and spirals and wheels, and just when I was about to cut her off, her voice gained a sudden strength, a conviction in terror.

She said that the moment we’re born, it’s this: either we’re going to live forever or be dead forever, either with ourselves or without for eternity, a length so long she hesitated to even call it as such, a choice she instead referred to as “the whistling black always”. In a voice sharp and trembling, she said that to her, both options were intolerable.

We sat there in silence for a long while. I mean, what can you say to that? I mentioned therapy, but it insulted her. She cut me off, said that therapy hadn’t helped, that nothing had really helped until about a week ago. She said she’d been posting about her issue online, trying to see if anybody else felt the way she did, asking for advice. And they’d answered.

She couldn’t describe what they’d shown her. She was throwing out these nonsense phrases and theories, pure gibberish: perpetual nth-degree tessellation, demi-angels manifesting in the post-flesh cylinder, hypermarrow travel, and most disturbingly, an ‘illuminatory disease’ called split-eye syndrome. She talked about opening image files that at first glance appeared completely blank, but upon a minute or two of staring, would reveal all the messages the blankness was truly composed of, that she could see the pixels that made up the pixels. I stopped her shortly thereafter. Why, I asked. Why, after all that, would you continue to talk to this person?

She flinched at this, gave a little shrug, her shoulders hunched in. She said I wouldn’t understand. She said they’d known things about her, things that nobody else knew. So you’re being blackmailed, I said. But that wasn’t it. She said they’d known about things in her head. Ideas for books she hadn’t written out yet. Dreams she’d had. Her eyes were glassed-over, and her voice had shrunk to a tiny wisp. I realized she didn’t sound scared at all anymore. If anything, she sounded...reverent.

I told her what that person had said at the restaurant and demanded to know exactly what they meant by ‘their offer still stood’. Taylor stared down at her drink for a long time. Then she admitted that they’d told her if they could meet in person, they could cure her of her fear.

That’s when I’d heard enough. Looking back, I feel that I went about it the wrong way, but it was late, and I was tired and angry and very scared. It all felt like some bad joke she was trying to pull on me. Or like she was willingly putting us both in danger. I assumed she’d talked to them about me with the whole name thing—again, rationalizing. I got up and snapped at her, said she wasn’t sick and didn’t need curing, that if that person was stalking her then we needed to get help, and that if she wouldn’t call anybody about them, then I would.

She absolutely lost it. Crying, begging, hanging off my arm, grabbing for my phone. She was red in the face, snotty, almost screaming, a total wreck. I couldn’t deal. I told her that she was acting like a toddler, that our neighbors were going to hear her and call the cops themselves, that she needed to grow up. I told her that everyone’s afraid of something, and that it’s just the way it is. What did she want me to do, say sorry she was born?

By that point, she’d curled up on the ground like she’d been kicked, a human pillbug, immobilized with whatever had overtaken her. “Please don’t,” she kept whispering. “Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”

Well. For better or worse, I didn’t. I was so repulsed by her tantrum that I just wanted to be done with it, to go to bed and forget that that night had ever happened. I lied and told her that I needed to get some sleep for some exam I had the next day, probably tacked on some snide remark about how she’d kept me from studying for it. She didn’t respond, just laid there in tornado-drill position, and after I slammed my door, it was quiet.

She didn’t come to breakfast the next morning. It makes me sound like a bad friend, I suppose, but I was fine with it. I was still upset with her and didn’t want to start another fight. I was shocked that we’d fought at all; in all the years we’d known each other, we’d never argued. I started to feel like an idiot for not listening to all the people who told us not to room together. As for that person, I figured I could buy a taser, and Taylor already had pepper spray, if not the sense to use it.

The exams I’d lied about did roll around, and we spent more time apart even after we got back to speaking terms. Taylor started spending more time in her room, and I’d go on walks, looking up through the leaves in the daytime and watching the stars at night. I’d hear noises from across the apartment that I didn’t want to investigate. There were times when I’d hear her tearing and crumpling papers, but like I said, she was an English major. I just figured she was having a rough time writing. There were other times where I’d swear I heard her scream, but the noise was always gone when I yanked out my earbuds. I never asked her about it. I didn’t want a repeat of last time.

Then one night, I had some stupid question I needed to ask her, maybe whose turn it was to cook. I knocked on her door around eight, and it creaked open on its own. Please don’t look at me like that. I know how it sounds. But it gave me the same feeling I’d had weeks ago, like everything around me was spinning on a movie reel, and that anything that happened next was always going to happen, no matter what.

I stepped inside and thought I’d whited out. I thought the lights were too bright and I couldn’t see and that my eyes would adjust after a few moments. But no. The room was...papered. Everything had been plastered in countless sheets of blank paper: the walls, her furniture, the floor, everything. Her window was blotted out. Her textbooks had been wrapped in them. Even her bed—she’d sewn the pages over her quilt with white thread, and when I yanked it off the bed, an avalanche of even more paper spilled out. She’d stuffed her pillows with them, too. I know because at this point, I was tearing paper off of everything like it was Christmas morning, refusing to believe what I was seeing, convinced that the next tear would bring her room back, or somehow, bring her back. But every rip would just reveal more blankness underneath, layers and layers, the papers endlessly repeating, and Taylor was nowhere to be found.

My legs gave out a bit, and I sank to the ground. It was insanity. I couldn’t believe it. An awful wave of guilt hit me as I stared at the pages surrounding me, adrift in a white void. My roommate— _my friend_ —had completely lost her mind, and I hadn’t even noticed. Hadn’t cared. I was staring off into nothing, feeling sorry for myself, when I noticed something. Have you ever seen a Magic Eye puzzle? You know how it looks crazy at first, but then you either cross your eyes, or let them go out of focus, and then it gains this new dimension? It was...sort of like that. But impossible.

The whiteness on the page I’d been staring at fell through. It dropped. I can’t describe it. It zoomed out on itself, and suddenly, floating above it, was what Taylor had been ranting about the night we fought. There was writing in all different kinds of handwriting and fonts and sizes and intensities, all in white letters, somehow superimposed over the original blankness at the same time as composing it. And even though some of them were in different languages or told through shapes or so scrawled as to be unintelligible—even though it was impossible for me to be seeing it all—I could read every word of it. And it all said the same thing.

Can I show you something? Can I show you something? Can I SHOW YOU SOMETHING CAN I SHOW YOU SOMETHING? CAN I SHOW YOU SOMETHING. CAN I SHOW YOU SOMETHING

I—oh my God. I need a moment. [SUBJECT PAUSES, FINISHES GLASS OF WATER] I’m so sorry. I won’t say it again.

I’m not sure how much time I wasted trapped in there, but by the time I pulled myself away to try and find Taylor, the moon was high, and the stars seemed harsh in the night sky, as if the blackness was just a moth-eaten mask laid over a horrible white expanse burgeoning underneath.

It came as little shock to see her making a beeline for The Amber Parlor. I grabbed her by the shoulder, and when I turned her around, it was obvious she’d been crying, her eyes ringed red and her face very pale. Seeing me agitated her. When I told her that we should go, she shook her head and told me it was too late. I tried to argue with her, but she told me to go, saying it was too dangerous and that she’d made her decision.

Then...I saw them, leaning out of the shadows, their smile as brilliant as the scouring stars. Taylor and I both startled, backing away on some animal instinct as they approached us. There was a long silence, which Taylor broke with a voice gnarled with desperation. "Can you cure me?", she asked. Begged, really. "Can you make me unafraid?"

They laughed, and I would’ve put my hands over my ears if I wasn’t frozen in terror. It seemed to jostle every atom in my body, threatening to shake them slowly apart until I’d dissolved into the space around me. Then, very clearly, they said, "I shall make your fear so sublime as to become transcendent."

Taylor didn’t respond. Her eyes darted towards me, the whites overcutting them like a dog’s will when it’s in pain, and she didn’t seem to know which of us to address next. As she deliberated, that person—that thing—turned its attention towards me.

It began to taunt me. Said it sensed no fear from me, just a fascination. It asked me if I knew how silly it was for my friend to be afraid of eternity when everything that we could conceive of was laughably microscopic compared to all the nothing surrounding it. It asked me if I knew what it meant. It asked me if I wanted to see just how much nothing there was.

Taylor broke in, voice trembling, though whether in fear or anger, I'm not sure. She said it had told her I wasn’t suitable. It laughed and said that was true. Then it advanced on me, its eyes beginning to twitch and flutter, and I knew the truth in the way a mouse knows to fear a lion’s jaws: whatever this thing was about to show me would kill me.

Before I could react, I was pushed to the ground. I landed mostly on my shoulder but clocked my head as well, and as I’d hit asphalt, I was halfway blacked out when it happened. For a moment so brief I could have sworn I imagined it, the world was filled with a terrible light, and the skies rang with a cacophony: every single thing that had and would ever live and die, screaming all at once. Then it was quiet.

Taylor was on the ground, passed out. Her hair had gone stark white, except for a small shock of blonde near the front, the only part of it that still looked healthy. She was breathing, but she didn’t open her eyes. Her lips began to move, as if she were about to say something in her sleep, and she—she smiled. The same smile they’d had. And I knew, just knew, that when she came to, what the first words out of them would be.

I couldn’t bear it. I called an ambulance for her and left as quickly as I could. I went to my parents’ house. I cried into their arms. They asked me what was wrong, but all I could say was nothing, nothing.

Taylor disappeared a few days after that. Left all of her stuff, left me to deal with all the questions from her parents and the police. God, that was a nightmare. I barely got through that semester. But you know, time passed, and after that, I moved into a smaller apartment, met my boyfriend at the time. Got on with my life. I think the only other run-in I had—well, I might have blown it out of proportion. You tell me. I was walking down campus one day, and you know how students will put posters and stickers on the telephone poles around there to advertise for their events and bands and whatever. Regular college stuff.

I saw one that was just...a blank piece of paper. It gave me this horrible feeling—dizzy, clammy, acid in my stomach. Pure fear. Even so, I was drawn to it, walking over before I knew what I was doing, that movie-reel feeling coming back for the first time in months. It was stark against the brown pole, and as I stared at it, I noticed that the staples at its corners were also white. Then—I don’t know if my eyes had just gone out of focus or not, but I thought I saw it start to ‘drop’ again. I ripped it off as fast as I could, expecting to see another, and another, and another, and more and more and more, an infinite tunnel of paper going back forever.

But it was just the one. I remember the corners on top had stayed stuck to the pole, white as snow atop dark soil, flapping against the whistling wind.

Anyways. I’m graduating later this year with a degree in marketing. The whole thing put me off astronomy as a career. But like I said, I’ve just recently married, and things are looking up. I know it’s been a couple of years, but I only found out about your organization a few weeks ago, and only gathered up the courage to come down today. I thought that maybe...I don’t know. Maybe if you all knew about her, you all could find her. You could help her. Then I can leave knowing I tried everything that I could.

I mean. That’s what a friend would do, right?

—

Statement ends.

This account was mailed over from the American sister branch with a very frenzied request for any information regarding similar sightings or phenomena we’d had overseas. Sorry to say we have none—or rather, I’m not very sorry at all, as this sounds like a disturbing case indeed.

I find it curious that Miss Davis had at one point referred to eternity as “the whistling black always” but later became obsessed with the color white. It brought to mind a large book I’d flipped through while bored at some friend of a friend’s flat—there was a vivid two-page spread of the color wheel with twee art facts dotted around it. The book claimed that where black was caused by the absorption of all pigment, white was more like true nothingness than we realize, a total lack of color. I’m not a scholar of the arts, but it makes me wonder if what she saw changed her mind.

Black and white, everything and nothing. It’s enough to give anyone a migraine, though perhaps it is best not to dwell on such things. Doing so, as Miss Davis has demonstrated, can leave one vulnerable.

End recording.

—


End file.
